


Her Boys

by jukeboxes



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Baby Bruce Wayne, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Healthy Relationships, Sickfic, Wayne Manor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24779959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxes/pseuds/jukeboxes
Summary: Alfred is sick, Bruce is unyielding, Thomas is tired, and Martha Wayne would do just about anything for her boys.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth/Martha Wayne/Thomas Wayne, Bruce Wayne & Martha Wayne, Martha Wayne/Thomas Wayne
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	Her Boys

**Author's Note:**

> This story is both dedicated to and inspired by Unpretty and her Sorrowful and Immaculate Hearts 'verse.

Martha Wayne did not merely _do_ things. No, instead of walking, she glided. Where the common folk sat, she reposed. Her husband often joked that to understand her complexities, one simply needed to carry around a thesaurus.

The only exception to this rule could be found in the tabloids. (That is, after all, where most exceptions come from. Everyone has standards until they’re in the grocery store checkout line, perusing over-exposed paparazzi photos of the rich and infamous.) In the tabloids, Martha Wayne fascinated. Could new Old Money successfully navigate a supermarket while carrying a plastic hand basket? As it turns out, yes! The Waynes really are just like us, the rags concluded. Housewives everywhere would sigh in unison and feel evermore near the glitz of modern one-percenters.

Martha flashed a smile in time with a paparazzo’s camera. As if she’d never been in a grocery store before she married Thomas. Please. She picked up an apple and thought about taking a libertine bite. But no one ever looked lovely munching on honeycrisp apples. Instead, she narrowed the corners of her eyes in what she knew was a flirtatious manner at the nearest vulture.

“Could you hand me a bag, there?” She fluttered her eyelashes and accepted the bag with a thank you and a “You’re a doll.” The last word rolled out of her mouth much like a tipped over basket of fruit, lasting about two syllables too long. She refused to smile at the man. Such an expression would seem too inviting. Martha Wayne did not care to be interviewed, at least not at the present moment.

Of course, being a woman in public was apparently justification enough to be bombarded. And being such a rich, famous, and good-looking lady, Martha began to worry about the white flashing lights drowning out the thrumming fluorescents. Her basket full of everything on the list Mr. Pennyworth had provided, she slithered to the cash register, moving like she was walking through a haunted house filled only with strobe lights. Martha suddenly imagined she was hiking through a wheat field shadowed by flying saucers. It was all very cinematic, very _Close Encounters_ , she thought, blinking rapidly in a way that she hoped looked pretty and purposeful. Until a voice called out:

“Martha—there are rumors of your husband being seen with a blonde man? Is he having a gay affair? Are you separated? What about your son?” Several voices began shouting questions that nearly made her cheeks flush with righteous anger. She wondered where Tommy and Alfred had ventured and been seen as a couple, rather than the employer and employee they usually posed as in public.

Martha, to a greater degree than her dear husband, Thomas, understood the value in outward appearances, in personal branding. Whenever she left the safety of Wayne Manor, she took great care to solidify into a plastic shell of a woman, a beautiful narcissist. What better emotional armor, she learned, than pretending you don’t have any to attack? 

Martha Wayne maintained an exacting standard of personal elegance that carried her, as Cleopatra’s footmen once did, through life. This is not to say she lacked depth. She was anything but shallow. Her eyes were those of a fox’s or a snake’s—any animal that was too cunning by half.

So she wore a mask: Mrs. Thomas Wayne’s lips were glossier than the magazine pages that featured them. She was more lurid than any tabloid. She floated above elite heads in sky-scraping heels. She was inaccessible.

Inaccessible to everyone but her boys.

* * *

Bruce loved wearing masks, which is why Martha was surprised upon entering Alfred’s room when she found Bruce maskless. He sat spinning on a rolling stool with one of Thomas’s old stethoscopes thrown around his neck like a cheap neon feather boa.

Bruce was obsessed with Thomas’s surgical masks.

“They hide my identity,” he explained one early morning after she’d asked what demon possessed him, waking her up like this—she’d like a few strong words with the imp. The lower half of Bruce’s face was covered in a robin’s egg blue material. “You don’t know who I am,” he said.

“Darling, I am your mother. I would recognize your left pinky toe in a police lineup.”

“My left pinky toe would never be accused of a crime. Your premise is silly.”

“Yes,” Martha continued, unmoved, “it is the cutest of all little itty-bitty toes.” She snatched one of the intruder’s legs and raked her crimson nails against the bottom of his foot. Bruce laughed like Martha, and they both laughed like a plastic bag full of gravy in flapping the wind. Bruce lost his balance and landed on his behind, squarely between his parents’ legs. He cleared his throat.

“You don’t know that! You don’t even know who I am,” he said pointedly.

“Oh Tommy,” Martha sighed, “what shall we do with this masked intruder besieging our marital bed?” She reached over blindly, tapping a muscular chest. The chest didn’t answer, as it had just gotten off a sixteen hour shift at the hospital the evening before. The poor thing had the worst sleep schedule in all of Gotham. Normally, Martha wouldn’t wake him, but she’d heard him giggling along with Bruce seconds ago. “Tommy.”

Thomas groaned, flipping a pillow over his head. “Show him where Brucie should be sleeping,” came the muffled response.

“I’m not besieging anything!” the masked intruder whined. “I’m gathering covert information!”

“In a surgical mask?”

“Mommy,” Bruce said, staring directly into her eyes. “Please have some imagination.”

Thomas coughed underneath his pillow.

“Sorry, dear. I’m afraid I’m just not very imaginative before I’ve had my morning coffee.” Deciding she was awake for the day, Martha played along, “What information?”

“That’s classified.” She supposed she should have seen that one coming.

“Who are you working for, you spook?”

Bruce drew up and squinted at her, offended. “I’m a spy, not a ghost!”

“A spy is like a ghost—”

“A spook is a spy—”

Thomas and Martha spoke over one another. Martha made a high-pitched noise in her throat.

“Let me do that line again, then: who are you working for, _spy_?”

“Are you his mark or his rival?” Thomas stage whispered, head on the proper side of his pillow again.

“I hadn’t decided, but I was aiming for femme fatale,” she winked at her husband.

“I’m not gonna fatal you, Mommy.” Bruce removed his mask and worried his lip. “I wouldn’t do that.” His eyes shimmered in distress.

“Oh, baby, come here,” Martha sat up and wiggled her fingers at him. Drawing him into a hug, she laid back down. She kissed his little forehead. The trio existed silently together for a moment. Once Martha was convinced her baby was suitably soothed, she spoke.

“Good spies don’t allow themselves to be captured by the enemy!” Of one mind, Thomas and Martha dove in, tickling Bruce, who squealed like a pig. Thomas laughed so loudly the window panes rattled.

“Ask Alfred for some spy lessons, chum,” he said.

“Why Alfie?”

“Oh,” Thomas searched for a reason that didn’t reveal Alfred’s MI6 roots to their young son. “He’s an actor. He knows things like that.”

“And he’s English,” Martha added. “James Bond is in his blood.”

“Mommy,” Bruce said here and now, sitting beside Alfred’s sickbed. He appeared incredibly disappointed. “If Al is sick, shouldn’t he wear a mask so we don’t catch anything?”

“Mister Bruce has been so gracious as to lend me one of his.” Alfred said, a cough puncturing his sentence. Martha could see the faint tenseness in his shoulders and neck. There was the beginnings of a frown behind his mask. “Did the market have the correct apples?”

“I’m not sure why you needed honeycrisps.”

“Mommy.”

“Mr. Pennyworth needn’t wear a mask if he does not want to. It's just a cold. Leave him be.”

“The cook prefers honeycrisps for her pies,” Alfred said.

Bruce’s eyes widened. “Is Miss Margot going to make apple pie for dessert?”

“After what I went through to get these apples? We will be feasting on apple pies and tarts for weeks if I have a say in it.  Bruce, honey, do you have homework to do?”

“I can do it later, I gotta get Alfie better.”

“But you’ve been doctoring Mr. Pennyworth for a while now,” she guessed, “you need to rest or your healing powers will wane.”

Bruce considered this. “No, I don’t think that’s how it works, Mommy.”

“Bruce. You have homework. I’ll doctor Mr. Pennyworth for a while.”

With an ugly groan, Bruce slapped his stethoscope into her outstretched hand and trudged out of the room. Martha perched on the stool like a queen upon her throne. The room glowed a warm yellow in the afternoon light. It was a sharp contrast to the artificial fluorescents of the grocery store. She relaxed, feeling the stress from her paparazzi-laden errand lessen near Alfred. She began to transition back to her private self.

“You look rotten,” she said, her mouth pinched into a pout. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen you. You’re death warmed over in a secondhand thrift store microwave. Quasimodo should be so blessed to have a face such as yours.”

“I see,” Alfred said. He pulled off the mask now that young Bruce had left. “At last my looks have gone the way of the sun each evening—set too soon. My beauty fades behind the horizon of age.” He attempted a British stoicism, but a trio of sneezes in the middle of his eulogy ruined it.

Without her consent, a raspy bark of laughter shot out of her. The sound was not unlike a water balloon hitting pavement from three stories up. And, as it did whenever she was truly tickled, the laugh devolved into a hacking wheeze. It sounded like the startled snore of a Lovecraftian eldritch monstrosity, though Alfred would never admit to the comparison. He found it adorable. Martha did not appreciate being called adorable. She did, however, adore being called any variation of gorgeous.

“You look too wonderful for a simple market trip,” he said. Except the words seemed to come out through his nose instead of his mouth. Martha warmed.

“There were photographers. I made sure to tell them that our poor butler was sick, likely on his deathbed, and of course I had to run in and grab some Theraflu and Lipton for him.”

“You exaggerate.”

“Never!” Martha elongated every vowel sound she could. “I absolutely bought you tea. Only the finest for you, dear.” She leaned down, dug out a small box of Lipton tea bags from her crocodile skin Birkin, and set the box on his lap. “Shall I microwave a pitcher of water for you?”

“This has become a hostile work environment,” Alfred said. He stared at the red box with undisguised disgust. “I’m tendering my resignation immediately.”

“Darling, you can tender me all. You. Want.” Martha winked. Alfred’s affront was so great he blew his nose. Martha cackled, and Cthulhu tossed and turned in his slumber.

“Shall I phone Tommy?”

“What would a bloody trauma surgeon do for a head cold?”

“Fuss incessantly.” The two smiled.

Martha stroked her index finger along the inside of Alfred’s wrist, tracing the faint blue of his veins. He was usually rather dashing when he wasn’t surrounded by used and snotty tissues. Alfred had the sort of thin, angular face for black and white film and a voice for the Globe Theater. In contrast, Thomas’s voice rang deep and broad like an old cathedral bell. When he was excited, it ping ponged down the Manor’s halls like an excitable golden retriever. When he was exhausted, it morphed into tolling, one-word sentences.

“Do you need anything?” she asked, a bit softer.

“Aside from the ability to breathe… no, thank you, Mrs. Wayne.”

“Do you want Bruce in or out?”

“If you could perhaps distract him for a few hours…”

"Of course. I'll send him to peel those apples I worked so hard to acquire." 

* * *

Shoulders slumped, Thomas shuffled into their bedroom later that night, which gleamed in the moody, flickering fire light. He squinted at Martha when he spied her on the burgundy chaise lounge. He grunted. One of those days, then.

“How was your day?” she said, placing a bookmark in her romance novel.

“People drive home after work.”

“Some take the train.”

“It was good. Car accidents.”

“Were they driving home from work, too?”

“No, Charles did.”

“Drove you?”

“Nurses told me there was a pile-up, after. ORs were in use. Busy.”

Martha didn't exactly understand what her husband was getting at, which was how she knew Thomas was about to be down for the count. She rose, glided across the lushly decorated room, and drew back the emerald covers of their bed. “Perhaps you should put the bed to use, dear.” She fluffed his pillow.

Thomas collapsed on the edge of the mattress. Gesturing to her scandalous romance novel, he said “Good muscles.”

“Yes, I’m enjoying it.”

“Alfred?”

“Well, far be it from me to complain if he worked out more. He certainly doesn’t need to, though.” He grunted again, aggressively face planting into his pillow. “Oh, _how_ is Alfred, I see now,” Martha teased. “He has been baptized in phlegm and mucus.”

“Bad?”

“He asked me to keep Bruce busy this afternoon. I’d half a mind to call you, after I heard that.”

The two were quiet for a few moments. Glancing over to make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep yet, Martha spoke again. “He’s like a cat.”

“Bruce?”

“Alfie. Never shows anyone he’s hurt or ill.”

“British.”

"Hm," she considered. "I think I'll kiss him senseless after he's free of the plague. No. I'll kiss sense into him."

Thomas hummed back.

"Exactly! He must be convinced to lean on us more often. The three of us, we're a team. A trinity." Thomas shot her a thumbs up. "I know he and I sass and act prim because that's our game, but I would clean up his snotty tissues. Like I have for you and Bruce before. Like I always will. I would bring him fancy tea in our bed if he'd let me. Oh, I found him a few of those pastries he adores at the market today—I had to go to the market for apples, for the pie. I didn't tell him yet because I want him to be surprised once he feels better. He was feeling so poorly earlier I spent a while bantering with him. Poor thing... maybe I should go check on him again?"

Thomas let out a gust of a snore. She wilted, leaning over to draw the covers tighter around him.

"I'm soliloquizing, aren't I, Tommy. Sweet dreams, darling." She kissed his head.

Standing, Martha drew her satin robe in tight and braved the dark halls to kiss her two other boys goodnight.

**Author's Note:**

> And then they all lived happily ever after forever :’)


End file.
